The Place of Belletristic Writing in Scholarly Publishing: The Council of Editors of Learned Journals Keynote Addresses MLA Convention 2003
Bibliographic record
Abstract
If literary awards were books, you could enter a library and find shelves of them, from the folio volumes of the Pulitzer and Nobel, requiring two arms to lift and carry to a table, to slim chapbooks like the Hillsborough Historic Society Award for Poetry on Topics of Local North Carolina History, Preferably about Orange County, which my daughter won when twelve years old. Yet if you wanted to find an award for the journals themselves, where all the individual award-winning writers publish their stories, poems, memoirs, essays, and other forms of belles lettres, or an award for the editors of those journals, even after an advanced search in WorldCat, as far as I am aware, you would turn up nothing. Such a ‘book’ has needed to be written - needed badly, in my view and in the view of other members of CELJ, whose membership includes many literary journals. In response to this embarrassing lack in our culture, CELJ worked during 2003 to establish such an award, and, at the MLA Convention in San Diego, the CELJ Award for Literary Achievement was unveiled. The award is actually a series of three rotating awards for Best New Literary Journal, Distinguished Literary Editor, and the Parnassus Award for Significant Editorial Achievement for a single issue of a journal that demonstrates a peak achievement of publishing mission. 1 It was only fitting, then, that the keynote addresses on the occasion of this important announcement be given by two prominent members of the literary publishing field. Hilda Raz, editor of the distinguished literary journal Prairie Schooner, and JeffreyLependorf, executive director of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, helped to celebrate the new award by speaking on the place of belletristic writing in scholarly publishing. Raz reflects on the long history of Prairie Schooner's role in nurturing writers, many of whom have gone on to become celebrated authors, and then outlines several ways in which such a publication contributes to the university institution of which it is a vital part. Lependorf puts forth the pointed argument that the literary journal, by providing a distinctly belletristic context for the critical essay, opens up scholarly work to a greater multiplicity of expression and meaning than is possible in a traditional scholarly publication. Freed from the constraints of the purely academic forum, criticism in the pages of literary journals, drawing equally on creative and scholarly purposes, can be radically opinionated, passionately reflective, critically experienced. Both Raz and Lependorf demonstrate that literary publishing in the academy is constitutive of the soul of the university.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.090 | 0.181 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.037 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.092 | 0.026 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.021 |
| Research integrity | 0.018 | 0.023 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.019 | 0.008 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".